Japan Celebrates: It's a Boy!

The Japanese imperial line is believed to be the oldest royal family in the
world, stretching back 2,000 years or more, but today it may have been saved
by
a brand-new baby boy. At 8:27 this morning, Tokyo time, Japan's
Princess Kiko  the wife of Prince Akishino, Emperor Akihito's second
son  gave
birth to her first boy. Because Crown Princess Masako has borne only a
single
daughter, and because Japanese law allows only males to ascend to the
Chrysanthemum Throne, Kiko's 7.5 lb. baby will almost certainly be the
future
Emperor of Japan. For the Japanese royal family and its core conservative
supporters, the infant prince is cause for both joy and relief. His birth
is a
guarantee that the supposedly unbroken line of male succession to the
throne
will continue for at least another generation. But though the country is
busy
celebrating the royal arrival  newspapers passed out extra editions on the
streets of Tokyo and economists predicted the birth would spark a mini-baby
boom worth over $1 billion  the desperate need for a prince shows how far
women
still have to go, even in modern Japan.

The problem began with Princess Masako. An accomplished Harvard-educated
diplomat, fluent in four languages, Masako married Crown Prince Naruhito in
1993 and was expected to bring a welcome dose of feminism to the stuffy
Japanese imperial family. Instead, Masako was swallowed whole by the all-powerful
Imperial
Household Agency (IHA), the palace insiders that guard  and, according to
some
observers, dominate  the lives of the royal family. Unlike the British
royals,
for instance, the Japanese imperial family's schedule is completely
controlled
by the IHA. They aren't allowed to have opinions, passports or
even
last names. Stifled by the IHA, Masako crumbled under the intense pressure
to
perform her single duty: to bear a male heir. In 2001, after one miscarriage,
she
finally bore Princess Aiko, who remains the couple's only child. Not long
after
the birth, Masako succumbed to a depression that many blamed on the intense
pressure placed on her to produce a son. She withdrew from her official
duties,
and at 43, seems extremely unlikely to produce another child.

Kiko, the second princess, had produced only daughters as well, and the
Japanese royal family seemed in real danger of dying out. With that in
mind,
last November Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi backed an initiative that
would
change Japanese law to allow a female  4-year-old Princess Aiko  to become
Empress. Most Japanese were in favor of the new law, thinking that the time
had
come when a woman could sit on the throne. (In fact, Japan has had several
reigning empresses in the past, though none were allowed to pass the throne
onto their children.) But the imperial family has long been a rallying
point
for Japanese conservatives, who consider the emperor the spiritual center
of
Japan, and they fought hard against the possibility of an Empress: 170 Diet
members signed a cross-party petition against the new law, and other
opponents included the conservative Chief Cabinet Secretary  and likely
future
Prime Minister  Shinzo Abe. Former Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma's
xenophobic
comments were typical: "If Aiko becomes the reigning empress and gets
involved
with a blue-eyed foreigner while studying abroad and marries him, their
child
may become emperor," he said in February. "We should never let that
happen."

The liberals, though, had public support and demography on their side.
With
both princesses pushing middle age, where was a new prince going to come
from?
But then, as the debate heated up, the IHA made the surprise announcement iin February that 39-year-old Kiko was
pregnant
and was due to give birth in September, just when Koizumi was scheduled to step
down.
"I feel God really exists," said the conservative former justice minister
Hiroshi Nakai on hearing the news. Though the Internet burned with
speculation
over the suspicious timing of Kiko's pregnancy, the news immediately put
Koizumi's initiative on the back burner. Now, with the birth of a prince,
the
law is almost certainly dead, and Kiko's boy will cut ahead of Aiko in the
line
of succession . Still, the quick abandonment of the revision reminds Japanese
women
just how low the glass ceiling still remains in their country, and
underscores
how strong political conservatism has become in Japan.

But given Japan's demographic trends, the Chrysanthemum Throne may not be
a
boy's club much longer. It took the royal family 41 years to produce this
prince, and when Aiko and her two royal cousins grow up and almost
certainly
marry commoners, they'll be snipped from the imperial family, leaving the
boy
the last royal. If the prince and his future wife have the Japanese average
of
1.25 children, odds are just about even that they'll only produce
princesses  and this time, there'll be no backup pregnancies to bail them out.